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For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Haruki Murakami

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Haruki Murakami
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 12
Athletics Competitor
Essayist
Linguist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Kyōto
Murakami Haruki
Something
Second
Basement
Really
Stay
Basements
Create
Passage
Stills
Passages
Still
Sane
Find
Musicians
Need
Novelists
Needs
Musician
Downstairs

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Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.
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I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?
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He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
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The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.
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Whoa! he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. Chicken salad a la George Orwell!
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Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.
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This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.
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As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.
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As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.
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What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.
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I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I'm always clamming up.
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When I'm running I don't have to talk to anybody and don't have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can't do without.
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Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.
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Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.
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She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.
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Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.
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What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!
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As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.
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Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.
Haruki Murakami
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I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.
Haruki Murakami